OK, this has been in the works for a few months now and I was finally able to put v1 live this morning. I held off saying anything as I thought there was a problem (there isn't, more of that in a moment).

What this is NOT...

First of all, up front I want to say that right now, this is NOT a replacement for the high score tables found at http://arcadehighscores.com/ukvac we don't want to detract from the great work that Jochen, Stefan and any of the other guys are doing over there.

So, what is it then?

Well..., as soon as we knew about these kits, I think some time back in the summer Oll mentioned it to me, and we saw what they could do, we all kind of went "wouldn't it be cool if we could have a copy of the scores on UKVAC themed to match our site", followed by me saying "that should be easy enough". Queue me needing to put my money where my mouth was, so to speak.

Along the way, we have been working with Jochen so that we are not just blindly ripping this stuff off without consent or knowledge. So my design goal is intentionally not to just repeat what is available on the main site. Sure we've themed the tables to our liking, and we very much hope you like them too. To reflect this, our scores are updated daily at midnight (automatically) and we only store the top / last three. If you want to see more than that, go to the main site and start drilling down into the scores.

Uh, so why bother?

Well. We are already hard at work on v2. And for version 2 we will not just be pulling the top 3 of each (top / last). We will probably still only show the top 3, but we will basically have a local copy of our scores. I can tell people will still be going, "huh?, so what"

There's still a bunch of stuff to work out, but what we hope this means is that in the future we will be able to do some cool things in the forum like maybe have badges applied to profiles for champions, we can promote "game of the month" type competitions and I'm sure plenty of things that we have not already thought of. That's where you guys come in.

I appreciate this won't float everyone's boat, but if the prospect of linking your machines up to the outside world excites you like it does us, then let us know what you'd like to see, come up with things we might not have thought of and just generally get involved.

There is already a tonne of stuff behind the scenes that you won't see. And I mean a lot. And something we have already designed in is the ability to create scoreboards for events and such like (sadly we weren't ready in time for Revival Winter Warmer).

Finally, up to now it's been a bit one-way as we've been beavering away on getting the initial version up, but we have offered our help wherever it may be needed and I fully intend to ensure that we give back to arcadehighscores.com where we can, including contributing any ideas or fixes or anything else that comes up. This needs to be a collaboration.

What about the existing high score tables?

Yep, this question is BOUND to come up straight away. We're considering the idea of merging the existing scores and working out how we could do it. But it's a completely and utterly different kettle of fish. What you see here is all fully automated, from the scores leaving your cab to us getting an email notification if something went wrong at our end (for the final leg of the journey). The existing high scores are entirely manual.

It's possible, I already thought of a way, but there would be a massive amount of work involved and since we already have a good system for them, I consider it secondary (this is my own opinion, some of the team would like to give it a higher priority ).

I will say now, that IMO, mame and manually submitted high scores are likely to never be mixed with the automated hardware high scores. For many reasons.

How do I get involved?

Simple. Go buy a kit for your games. The link is in the header of the score page. When you buy a kit (or kits), provided you buy the version with the internet upload, you will get from Jochen a unique pair of security keys that identify you. If you want to participate in the UKVAC boards just let Jochen know and after a quick bit of verification with us (to make sure we don't add banned users basically) then your scores will be picked up both on the main site and our page. It's that simple.

Don't the scores look odd?

OK, I said I held off mentioning it because I thought something was wrong. Jochen has implemented something that users have asked him for whereby in the TOP table, a persons name can only appear once. This kind of makes sense so you don't see the same name for all three scores. But it does explain why some games have 3 latest scores, yet only 2 top ones. Had me scratching my head until Jochen explained it to me.

Why is my name a bunch of stars?

UKVAC is meant to be family friendly. So we've implemented a profanity filter. If your name or initials spell something they shouldn't then sorry, it will be bleeped out. And yes, I know as of today, the filter needs a bit of training

Thanks.

Obviously I want to thank all the people behind the kits and the site arcadehighscores.com for coming up with this stuff in the first place. I know it is something that has been talked about a lot over the 15 or 16 years I've been into this stuff, but finally someone did it. Not so obviously, I want to thank ukvac member Pobster for all his hard work with me on this. We have been collaborating on the code, with issue trackers and all the rest of it. Cheers dude.

When we have more scores (API stuff) we'll probably make individual game pages (per group) which will link through, but until then an entire page for each game looks a little "empty" with only the top/ last three

You can link to each game if you want (if that's what you're after), the dropdown is a "scrollspy" so e.g. using http://www.ukvac.com/hs/#dkjr takes you to Donkey Kong Jr.

Hey Guddler, if you pass all the background and marquee images through ImageOptim (or other such compression tool) then you can save about .5MB on the page size (2MB down to 1.5MB). I know it's not much but might give a better user experience :)

That wasn't quite what I meant, I get that. There is no full ukvac score table for each game on our site, the whole point of this is not to take visitors away from the main arcadehighscores.com site, so if you want the full results you need to go there. The link is at the top of the page.

The links on the main site are not friendly for individual games so we can't link direct to an individual game on the main site.

As Pob says, were implementing a different method of fetching the scores. Once that's done we will be able to do a lot more of what we want without being so tied to the layout of the main site, however the design goal will still be to not take visitors away from the main site so exactly what we implement is still to be defined.

Nes4Life wrote:

Hey Guddler, if you pass all the background and marquee images through ImageOptim (or other such compression tool) then you can save about .5MB on the page size (2MB down to 1.5MB). I know it's not much but might give a better user experience :)

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